The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography

By Sophia Lambton

Coating opera's roles in opulence, Maria Callas (1923-1977) is a lyrical enigma.

Seductress, villainess, and victor, queen and crouching slave, she is a gallery of guises instrumentalists would kill to engineer... made by a single voice.

But while her craftsmanship has stood the test of time, Callas’ image has contested defamation at the hands of saboteurs of beauty.

Twelve years in the making, this voluminous labour of love explores the singer with the reverence she dealt her heroines. The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography reaps never-before-seen correspondence and archival documents worldwide to illustrate the complex of their multi-faceted creator - closing in on her self-contradictions, self-descriptions, attitudes and habits with empathic scrutiny. It swivels readers through the singer's on- and offstage scenes and flux of fears and dreams... the double life of all performers.

In its unveiling of the everyday it rolls a vivid film reel starring friends and foes and nobodies: vignettes that make up life.

It's verity. It's meritable storytelling.

Not unlike the Callas art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sophia Lambton
• Release date: Dec 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781739286392

Sophia Lambton

Sophia Lambton became a professional classical music critic at the age of seventeen when she began writing for Musical Opinion, Britain's oldest music magazine. Since then she has contributed to The Guardian, Bachtrack, musicOMH, BroadwayWorld, BBC Music Magazine and OperaWire, and conducted operatic research around the world for a non-fiction work set to be published in 2023.Crepuscular Musings - her recently spawned cultural Substack - provides vivid explorations of tv and cinema together with reviews of operas, concerts and recitals at sophialambton.substack.com.The Crooked Little Pieces is her first literary saga. Currently she's working on her second.She lives in London.

Book preview

THE CALLAS IMPRINT

A Centennial Biography

THE CREPUSCULAR PRESS

London

First published in Great Britain by The Crepuscular Press 2023

Copyright 2023 © Sophia Lambton

Jacket design by Renée Clarke

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

Set in 10/12pt Constantia

Typeset by RefineCatch, Bungay, Suffolk

Printed and bound by Clays Ltd., Elcograf S.p.A.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-7392863-2-3

ISBN 978-1-7392863-4-7 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-7392863-9-2 (ebook)

https://thecrepuscularpress.com/

Contents

Acknowledgements

Permissions

List of Illustrations

Prologue. Break normality.

1.      Voluptuous intoxication

2.      A sort of a straitjacket

3.      "Strings of the heart and the mind"

4.      Thick as molasses

5.      Like going to church

6.      In a room with little light

7.      Everything seems in a dense fog

8.      Extreme poetry

9.      Chantilly

10.    A human note

11.    Pure stage

12.    Being conscientious

13.    Little checking machines

14.    Like a signature

15.    Consciously watching

16.    Redimensioning

17.    The ‘intangible’ 

18.    "Espèce de vapeur"

19.    Inside is your mirror

20.    Calculate in the dark

21.    The illusion of a better world

22.    Carte blanche

23.    Beauty is truth.

Legend

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

Liberty for many is deliverance from an unfinished self: a rediscovery of confidence too prone to fritter in our fragile adolescence.

Thanks in large part to the individuals here cited, mine remained for a long time unshakeable.

A stepping stool was granted me to board the rocky ship that is Maria Callas’ historiography. In that vein I am first of all indebted to a swath of predecessors: the late Nicholas Petsalis-Diomidis—whose mountain of studies on Callas’ formative years makes all others seem knoll-like; the insightful descriptions of Renzo Allegri, who introduced many to Callas the Veronese débutante; the belabored analyses of Stelios Galatopoulos—who made Maria look into herself—and all who have uncovered never-published correspondence since her death.

A nineteen-year-old nobody seems scarcely promising in the expended role of new Callas biographer—but many welcomed her into their home. Among that warm division pouring self-esteem into an antsy first-time documentarian were several who have since passed on. This book is generously indebted to the late Janine Reiss—my first interviewee: a vocal coach and a delectable sophisticate par excellence. Luigi Alva bought me tea at Ristorante Savini (they still call it Biffi Scala). Sir John Tooley spent an afternoon regaling me with tales sat in his Cambridge kitchen and the speedy Natale Rusconi answered e-mails far beyond the needs of etiquette.

The tender Georganne Mennin graciously received me hours late after I’d shown up at an incorrect address in Brooklyn—making for a venture unforgettable. Athenian sunshine lit the backdrop of confabulations with the ever-lovely Marilena Patronicolas and the detail-oriented Korinna Spanidou; Taki Theodoracopulos provided entertainment on a drizzly London (evidently July) afternoon. Giovanna Lomazzi afforded hospitality both in Italian and French. Fabrizio Melano challenged my live Callas recording preferences: insatiable fun for a fanatic. Eugene Kohn dispensed an irresistibly delightful opera-based exchange, John Copley and I traded backstage anecdotes and the incalculably helpful Bettina Brentano became a whole part of my life.

And then there were those lengthy phone chats—perhaps not dissimilar to Callas’ own spillages—stretched over timezones and ungodly hours. A pleasure it was to delve deeply into Juilliard with Marko Lámpas—whose own memoir is unmissable material for anyone who hankers to extract more facts from the soprano’s pedagogical immersion. Joan Lasker Sobel’s input became indispensable for this inspection also. Ninon Dimitriadou-Kambouri and Mary Annexy elaborated on the Callas childhood, producing Kalogeropoulou family portraits from tireless memory banks.

For tolerance of me I likewise thank Cordelia van Zuylen, Thérèse Darras, Gregor Benko, Elaine Reynolds Duke, Sophie de Ségur, Pino Buso, Aristides Embiricos, Carola Shepard, Piero Robba and his associate Francesca Sgroi, Joseph Rescigno, Caterina d’Amico, Jake Tanner and the late, warmhearted Barrie Smith: a gem gone far too soon.

I’m also grateful to my former editor Robert Matthew-Walker: a man whose faith in me (as well as Callasian reminiscences) braced this unready fledgling for her flight into the sphere of opera criticism.

Sharing portions of a life is one thing—digging into drawers to salvage long-forgotten correspondence stored away another. For the long and hardy undertaking of unearthing documents I owe a large bulk of this work to Giovanni Mion—who threw in a free tour of Turin in the mix; Bruno Antoniolli in Desenzano del Garda and his Elvira de Hidalgo remembrances; the late, eternally resourceful Fabio Gervasoni—a terrific correspondent and an even better archivist; Nicos Haralabopoulos, Gianni Tanzi, Cristian Finoia and Federico Vazzola.

Even the most obsessive journalist cannot be torn across multiple continents at once. For rifling, photocopying, scanning and identifying I’m indebted to the following:

Constantina Stamatoyannaki at the Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive in Athens (E.L.I.A.); George Iliopoulos at the Municipal School of Music of Kalamata, Messinia; Giovanna Bosman and Eleonora Lattanzi at the Fondazione Gramsci, Rome; Jeni Dahmus at the Juilliard School Library, New York; Nathan Coy at the Stanford University Archive of Recorded Sound; Natalia Guga at New York Public Library; Tara C. Craig at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Columbia University, New York; Joy Austria at the Newberry Library, Chicago; Arcadia Falcone at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin; translator Fani Kanatzia of Athens and a heap of people who remain anonymous at the British Library; the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra de Paris; the Koninklijke Bibliothek in The Hague; the Victoria & Albert Museum Theatre and Performance Archive, London; the Biblioteca Nazionale di Roma; the Library of Congress, Washington D.C. and the State Library of Victoria, Australia.

Thank you for gifting me a dreamlike youth.

Permissions

Excerpts from THE GRAND SURPRISE: THE JOURNALS OF LEO LERMAN by Leo Lerman, 2007 by Stephen Pascal. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts from THE NEW YORK TIMES © 1958. The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.

Excerpts from SAFE PASSAGE: THE REMARKABLE TRUE STORY OF TWO SISTERS WHO RESCUED JEWS FROM THE NAZIS © 2008 by Ida Cook. Permission to reproduce granted by Harlequin.

Excerpts from THE UNKNOWN CALLAS: THE GREEK YEARS by Nicholas Petsalis-Diomidis © 2001. Use licensed by Lidia Petsalis-Diomidis.

Excerpts from Nana Mouskouri’s MEMOIRS Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear. © X O Editions 2007.

Excerpt from Martin Kettle’s I DIDN’T WANT TO BE A DIVA from The Guardian (Edition of 8 May 2002) Copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2023.

Excerpts from Isaiah Berlin’s ENLIGHTENING: LETTERS 1946-1960 edited by Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle from The Trustees of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust. Copyright 2011.

Excerpt from WAGNER BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL by John Deathridge. © 2008. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from MY LIFE IN AMERICA AND WHAT MARIA CALLAS TAUGHT ME by Marko Lámpas. © 2011.

Other permissions are cited in the endnotes.

The author has made her best efforts to locate the copyright owners of works herein cited. Any possible accidental omission is deeply regretted and can be reported to The Crepuscular Press through its website:

https://www.thecrepuscularpress.com

List of Illustrations

  1With Evangelia and Jackie, c. 1937. Photo © Archivio GBB / Bridgeman Images.

  2With some canaries and an unknown man in Athens, c. 1940. © ullstein bild Dtl./Getty Images.

  3On the SS Rossia, June 1947. © Archivio GBB / Alamy Stock Photo.

  4With Maestro Tullio Serafin, c. 1952. © Tully Potter Collection.

  5With Wally Toscanini, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, lawyer Teodoro Bubbio and director Tatiana Pavlova. © Archivio Publifoto Intesa Sanpaolo.

  6As Elvira in a promotional shot for I puritani, May 1952. © Simón Flechine, Colección Fonteca Nacional INAH.

  7At the recording of I pagliacci, with Giuseppe Di Stefano, June 1954. © Erio Piccagliani/Teatro alla Scala.

  8As Norma in a publicity shot for a La Scala production, 7 December 1955. © Erio Piccagliani/Teatro alla Scala.

  9With Leonard Bernstein, mid-February 1955. © Mario Dondero. All rights reserved 2023 / Bridgeman Images.

10As Violetta on opening night of La traviata at La Scala, 28 May 1955. © Erio Piccagliani/Teatro alla Scala.

11With Meneghini in Rome, 14 January 1958. © Associated Press/Alamy Stock Photo.

12Enshrouded in reporters, 1958. © Maurice Zalewski/adoc-photos.

13As Imogene in a promotional shot for Il pirata at La Scala, 28 May 1958. © Erio Piccagliani/Teatro alla Scala.

14At Kingsway Hall, London, recording Lucia di Lammermoor, March 1959. © Derek Bayes. All rights reserved 2023 / Bridgeman Images.

15With father George Callas, New York, 27 January 1959. © Ben Martin/Getty Images.

16In concert thanking fans in Stuttgart, 19 May 1959. © Archiv Robert Lebeck.

17With Luchino Visconti in Milan, 5 September 1960. © Erio Piccagliani/Teatro alla Scala.

18With Aristotle Onassis in Monte Carlo, 22 July 1959. © Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet via AFP.

19With Onassis at an airport, 1962. © akg-images / Interfoto.

20At the studio recording for Carmen in Paris, July 1964. © Sabine Weiss, Collections Photo Elysée.

21As Tosca with Tito Gobbi as Scarpia in Franco Zeffirelli’s Royal Opera House production, 1964. © John Massey Stewart/Bridgeman Images.

22In a still from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Medea, summer 1969. © Granger/Bridgeman Images.

23With Pasolini, Jeddah and Pixie in Monaco, 1971. © Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty Images.

24Again with Pasolini for a press conference at Paris’ Cinéma Bonaparte, 31 January 1970. © Giovanni Coruzzi/Bridgeman Images.

25In concert at Massey Hall, Toronto, 21 February 1974. © Doug Griffin/Toronto Star Collection/Getty Images.

26Post-concert with Giuseppe Di Stefano in Madrid, 20 November 1973. © Album/Alamy Stock Photo.

27With Jacques Chazot in Paris, 13 December 1974. © Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images.

Prologue: Break normality.

Intangible was her own epithet for it; that realm that Schopenhauer deemed the purest of the arts. Music inhabited a separate platform of existence. Singing was no act of pride, in Callas’ own words, but merely an attempt to rise toward those heights where everything is harmony.¹ That fluster of tenacious instruments that fused and wrangled, clashed and melded was another stage whose lofty boards one deigned to tread.

Stumbling by accident into the Sistine Chapel was music critic William Weaver’s description of a Callas performance.² Yves Saint Laurent became overexcited: Empress, queen, goddess, sorceress, hard-working magician, in short, divine … You took away everything with you. Deprived of its enchantress, the red and gold pit functions no longer … Those overwhelming gold-fringed curtains, those shadowed ground-floor boxes, those loges, those galleries, those balconies, those rows of plush seats, those arc lights, those spotlights, those marble stairs, they are YOU!³

Frenzy was awakened. Poring over books and journals from the fifties to the present day, we stumble upon lexemes taken from her name across a gallery of languages: callasien, Callasite, callasiano.⁴ The woman sparked a culture rather than a cult. Lines of fans who camped out in their sleeping bags could brave the frost for four successive nights. Like soldiers during a nocturnal vigil in the trenches they remained alert to spot suspicious prowlers.⁵ Huddled together in the crowd were hippie teens and veterans from both world wars. At the peak of her career director Franco Zeffirelli wrote to her, Marlene Dietrich … says that in American hospitals they play your records continuously because they have discovered that your voice helps those who are ill, giving them confidence, calming them, and helping them to recover from what ails them.⁶

Why were so many hypnotized? Their world was hardly an artistic wasteland. In the pop culture domain were Sinatra and Elvis; for classical connoisseurs there were Bernstein and Karajan. Marlon Brando warmed box office seats. Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev electrified a scintillating onstage partnership that sent galvanic shockwaves through balletomanes and daydreamers alike.

But Callas lacked her colleagues’ knack for ranking on a scale; no adjective selectable on a report card was ascribable to her. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity was still gathering steam; metaphorically she had already debunked it. Relative was she to no one.

Witnessing performances of hers was a surreal transgression; stolen chances to escape the rut of everyday existence and take steps into oblivion: a radiance accessible by different routes. Some inhale its heady aura strolling down the twisted path of Broadway; showered by caresses from a flurry of haphazard colored lights. Others stumble on it squeezing past the calligraphic swirls of tourists in the purple and mahogany mosaic of Venice, passing by its denizens of sprawled graffiti and the deluges of black canals encroaching on its banks. Eyefuls of it can be caught in hazy mists enshrouding the Niagara Falls: a bastion against ephemeral and seismic crises.

Some label it escape; others transcendence. What it really is is an encounter with the other.

How do we map out the other? What are its co-ordinates? A plenitude of vivid sketches can account for it. The eyes were the first source of her narration: generous opulent gems of black opal. If they were bullets, everyone in sight would be dead, photographer Diana Vreeland decreed.⁷

Onlookers cite her aquiline nose, the long tapers of fingers that helped her expression, a copious mane her admirers believed was jet black. Naturally brown, the locks were tinted with gold sun streaks. Sometimes she was even described as a redhead.

The fount of magic was the voice: an instrument that listeners attempt to liken to an oboe or a clarinet; at times even a flute. A natural sound was palpable somewhere beneath the portraiture of phrasings and inflections. Yet it’s difficult to unearth the raw voice: a paradigm entirely stripped of character. An actor’s instrument, it is a prop fluidly molded to create a role. Its pitch can oscillate; its volume slices human limits and an accent paints the personage.

The Callas voice could be a docile girl—Amina in Bellini’s La sonnambula; an imitation of a pair of gently chinking glasses. Embodying the steely quality of Princess Turandot it threatens death to all her subjects in the aria In questa reggia: an imperious execution of vindictive bloodlust. There was the eroticism of conniving Carmen; both beguiling and belittling in her prurient seduction.

At the polar end of this long line of roles was waif-like Violetta in La traviata. Callas would quote a letter from an English nurse who drew a parallel between the fragile voice that she had forged and victims of tuberculosis she had treated; in the singer’s words a timbre "on a little thread. It can break from one minute to the other."⁸

So little of her is preserved on film yet photographs are incandescent. While other singers were content to raise their arms or lift their chins to indicate despair, Callas donned the flesh and mind of characters. Lord Harewood limned the vivid escapades of hedonistic Violetta in La traviata: a young woman who "kicked off her shoes, swept glasses and crockery off the front of a table and leant back on it to sing her cabaletta …"⁹

Others recalled a Cio-Cio-san in Madam Butterfly whose face lit up as she committed suicide. Stripped of her dignity because Lieutenant Pinkerton has left her for a bland compatriot, the ex-geisha commits seppuku to salvage her honor. A critic remembered how Pinkerton called out her name as she thrust the knife into her stomach: Joy touched her, meeting death on the way.¹⁰

A phantasmagorical trance crystallized. When Callas sings the final phrases of the Air des Lettres piece from Massenet’s Werther, Tu frémiras (You will tremble), a tremor chills the voice. The character Charlotte has just foretold her kindred spirit’s suicide by reading one of his portentous letters. Callas’ tremor is no vocal defect; neither is it excessive vibrato. Organic, it is woven in the voice of Charlotte. Stylized. Could Callas realize the aria if these disturbances were taunting her? Nobody could. They are the throes of agony and grief and murkiness we strive hard to avoid; the ugliness we seek to scrub off real life’s scabrous surface.

It was the specter of the character through which she lived. Located just outside the entrails of the heroine, she gazed at her creation from afar—as though in retrospect. Charlotte is not the mirror of a woman visualizing her beloved dangling from a precipice. She is a ghost of it; an indefatigable echo. The threshold between simulated beauty and reality.

The purpose was to break normality, in her words.¹¹ The gift she lavished onto opera had as many metamorphoses as a kaleidoscope. Walter Taussig, one of her vocal coaches, opined that while most singers were reproductive artists, she was a creative artist.¹² There is a difference between imbuing a role with emotion—even with a wealth of authentic intensity—and taking its contours to twist them. Picasso’s sources were the same as Rembrandt’s: physiognomies, eyes, noses, lips and limbs. Even fruit bowls. But the master took these forms and zigzagged over them, creating new contortions. Works of originality broke through.

Callas treated opera the same way. It was never about clasping roles to kindle them with vents of fire. Fire only has a use when subject to restraint. Callas yielded what she called a "strange interpretation which made [the public] work a little harder … instead of saying, ‘Oh, what a lovely voice, oh what a lovely note, oh, how nice, how pleasant—let’s go home,’ they were disturbed … anything that disturbs a person in the beginning creates a bit of a … reaction."¹³ Previously pillaged of its sentimental truths and nuances to be a showcase for high notes, opera could now convert into a complex tapestry.

Callas rewrote a repertoire. An adorer of lesser-known, more difficult works of the bel canto period, she became their advocate for the sake of the triad: Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini. These were her gods. When Rudolf Bing—General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera from 1950 to 1972—responded to her suggestion of staging Donizetti’s Anna Bolena with the bland comment, it’s an old bore of an opera,¹⁴ she took the idea to La Scala where director Luchino Visconti resurrected the work. Special effects like extra trills and scales and the interpolation of more high notes were anathema to her: This sets my work back a hundred years.¹⁵

A good girl in real life who had contempt for anarchy, she broke into rebellion in art’s sphere.

Her fantastical nature paved the way for a whole school of Callas mythology: an institution that expended gallons of black ink and dotted reams of paper. It’s strewn with lies and stories cooked from scratch; half-truths, acrylic narratives, synthetic tales and fables stitched from semi-natural sources. It never stopped and doubtless never will.

Yet one can’t be surprised by it. History has shown that geniuses are predisposed to feral conduct. Artistic greats who seem relatable make up a fraction of the sect. Run the gamut of them and the number of potential friends you’ll find will hover close to zero. Nobody could argue they were ordinary—let alone alike.

There was Marlon Brando’s rumored savagery and the occasion in which Rudolf Nureyev threw a chair and wrecked the furniture at his host’s party.¹⁶ Maria Malibran—the opera goddess of the nineteenth century—had a stillborn child. During her next pregnancy she quipped, "I hope to get out of this fix like last time.¹⁷ Dubbed the greatest actress of all time, Sarah Bernhardt yearned to sleep in a coffin. She had her mother buy one and was photographed in it.¹⁸ Prokofiev referred to the wife he abused as an infected tooth".¹⁹

They give us so much both aesthetically and soulfully.

Yet they fall short of meeting our criteria for friends or lovers.

Behind an overwhelming horde of stories that exploit her name it is precisely her normality that most incites suspicion. One of the recurring themes throughout her interviews is shyness. Callas was asked to name her complexes in 1970. "I’m very timid, oddly enough.—Timid? Really? journalist David Frost darted back. Very timid. It was hard for Frost to get his head around this so she had to clarify it for him. Not on stage … That’s different … I’m shy of er … revealing my inner self. But I’ve understood that I suppose—within the limits of my possibilities, let’s try and uncover myself." She laughed gently at her struggle to be open.²⁰

American mezzo-soprano Sandra Warfield remembered spotting her at a restaurant near La Scala at the apex of her twinkling career. Warfield had never met her but approached her to alert her she and all her friends were hyped up for her imminent performance. Callas suddenly looked scared. I hope they aren’t expecting too much, she replied.²¹ Constantly she claimed she didn’t like to talk about herself because "I find me boring."²²

Her aura emanated tenderness. Reared in an uncaring family, she seemed as much in need of love as an abandoned puppy; sometimes even rashly and naïvely. But it was something that she knew about herself.

A strong attraction to mother figures was a consistent motif in her life. The perennial one was Elvira de Hidalgo—a vocal coach who had granted sartorial advice and disparaged her nail-biting. Later Maria would financially support her.²³ Gestures from people she met only once could wrap this woman in a clutch of awe. Sat in the apartment of her friend, record producer Dorle Soria one day, she melted when the latter’s mother gave her homemade jelly from wild grapes and noted: This is the only thing I know wilder than you.²⁴

Kindness was one of her foremost constituents. Eileen Farrell never forgot her first meeting with Callas. She had approached her in a London restaurant one day in summer 1959 and introduced herself. Having seen her on the Met stage, Callas recognized her. When Farrell mentioned she was due to travel to Milan in a few weeks Callas immediately asked, How long will you be in Italy? Because I’m not using my house there, and I would love for you to use it for as long as you’d like.²⁵

Photos present for the most part a giddy, warm and open creature. Her radiant, thick locks at times transcend her shoulders; in one candid still she holds her poodle in the air above her face and dotes on him. Enormous spectacles would shield her eyes. In silent footage of her at a party of two English friends, Louise and Ida Cook, she sits insouciantly, espies the camera and instinctively responds with a colossal wink. It isn’t difficult to understand why biographer George Jellinek described her as a woman who radiates an incredible aura of defenselessness men find irresistible, though they should know better.²⁶

After a successful performance her excitement and buzz knew no bounds. She could spill out silly sentences and streams of garrulous affection. Her friend Stelios Galatopoulos recalled tailing her backstage on 22 June 1959 after a fearsome Medea. I followed her through … the labyrinth until she heard my footsteps, stopped round a corner and caught me with both hands. We were chattering about the performance when suddenly she raised her voice, accusing me of making her late: ‘Do you realize that the Queen is waiting for me?’ ‘It is not the Queen but the Queen Mother,’ I informed her with a touch of smugness. [She had summoned the soprano for a dinner at Clarence House]. Waving her hand rather extravagantly, Callas declared, ‘Same thing, isn’t it!’ ²⁷

Touches of self-consciousness gloss many of her letters. In one to music critic Irving Kolodin she adds in a postscript: I hope this letter makes sense to you because I was interrupted at least ten times whilst writing it.²⁸

During a Tosca in May 1965 she unexpectedly neglected to remove her contact lenses. Because of her compulsive need to live inside a character Callas preferred to enter every stage in her myopic state. For those hours she lived in a fog—and when it had suddenly cleared, horror iced her. "A terrifying thing happened to me! she gasped in intermission to her good friend Michel Glotz. For the first time, I saw my partners, the props, the furniture, the set designs, the orchestra, the conductor, and even the first rows. And I felt literally overturned, because this is the first time this has happened to me!"²⁹

All kinds of idiosyncrasies twitched in her personality. She had a habit of compulsively collecting recipes that she would never follow; something she referred to as "the only hobby that I have—isn’t it ridiculous? I know it is, but there you are!"³⁰ Sudden urges to polish silver or rearrange furniture at three o’clock in the morning—and encourage her friends who had come round for dinner to join in the fun—were in no way uncommon.³¹ Filming an interview in 1968, she fidgeted compulsively with a loose cushion thread, forcing technicians to stop her … noises were coming over the microphones like pistol shots.³²

The music that she worshipped was bel canto: swirls of mellifluousness. Yet her real-life speech pursued an altogether different rhythm. Callas’ spoken warm contralto travelled at a speedy pace; phrases were often strangely syncopated. Unexpected words were stressed and pauses halted utterances unpredictably. Her art was opera but her speech was beats in music by Scott Joplin. It yielded long lines such as: "I talk with myself frequently, Mr. Downes … Every now and then, I just withdraw to myself and I calculate things and I say, ‘Well, this happened and that happened, why should this happen, why did I do that, why should I do that, and why don’t I do it better and why don’t you have enough, er, willpower and, you know, you reason with yourself—doesn’t it happen to you?"³³

Every time she glowed with playfulness and giddiness there was an element of coyness in her; even a small dose of mischief. Ditziness conjoined in camaraderie with intellect. Neurotic and too nervous pre-performance, post-performance and between performances, she nonetheless kept her clear-headedness. Callas sparkled with the black and white gleam of the leading lady of a screwball comedy; Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby. You would have thought that she was an invention of the movies—but she wasn’t.

In addition to this she was sometimes melancholy; even lushly sentimental. Her favorite film was the 1939 Laurence Olivier Wuthering Heights.³⁴ Acutely aware of her dreaminess, she was self-deprecating about how much she allowed her mind to wander. I still live in the atmosphere of those silly librettos, full of foolish innocence and naïve idealism!³⁵ she wrote composer Renzo Rossellini.

Juxtaposed with the excited woman who would overemphasize her childish side that loved westerns³⁶ and adored tangos, Sinatra records, cha-chas; nice soft music, sometimes even rumbas and things like that,³⁷ was an artist eerily obsessed with her art.

"I’m perfectly normal—possibly," she once insisted to an interviewer.³⁸ Yet all the little and large actions that she implemented to create her work—to the detriment not just of her well-being but others’—reflect somebody light years beyond ordinary.

It was an addiction no external force could conquer and its name was loyalty to the composer. She accentuated it in every interview, in every article she ever wrote; in every conversation that she ever had: "We serve art and we serve the composers that were geniuses; we are not geniuses."³⁹ At the end of a session with vocal coach Janine Reiss in the sixties she sat down with a much-needed coffee. I hope he is happy, Maria despaired. Who? Reiss asked. Donizetti.⁴⁰

In this domain no shyness could blockade her wishes. She sought to have a hand in everything. Somehow she felt that she could contribute in a variety of ways to the fulfillment of composers’ wishes. Her opinions fill the pages of a letter from director Alexis Minotis to conductor Nicola Rescigno regarding their forthcoming Medea: She said that she would like her costumes not quite so Greek, but a little more barbaric … About the scenery, she likes the first and second act very much. Not so the third. She finds it too closed in.⁴¹

Artists are called divas when they try to get their way. Callas went out of her way to make her life even harder. Twenty-hour rehearsals were part of her ritual. Luchino Visconti depicted her perfectionism as a drive devoid of care for her well-being. It was 3:30 am at one point during a rehearsal of La sonnambula in 1955 when Visconti insisted they stop. Callas made a rare concession: she sat down. Just when Visconti thought their work was over she got up and everything resumed.⁴²

Every new success intensified her merciless self-loathing. When I sing I wish that my voice would obey me always … she wrote. At times I get to the point of invoking death to liberate myself from the torment and anguish that afflict me because I cannot succeed in attaining what I want.⁴³ Thousands of letters from her fans and endless lines of ticket-buyers petrified her; never did she view them as a metric of accomplishment. After spells of twenty- or forty-minute ovations she would retreat to her dressing room to sob furiously. Only she could know when she sang well: For this is the paradox, she once wrote. "What an audience feels is a great performance does not necessarily mean the same thing to me … Then at other times when I feel I have really given of my best the audience’s reaction is not the same. So the mystery remains. It haunts me."⁴⁴

Through such vignettes the portrait of a girl next door dissolves. Commentators have enjoyed dividing her into two individuals: genius and woman. Yet they co-exist. The Maria Callas who impaired her health to craft a memorable performance was the same frank woman who could openly express her complexes. She could barely give an interview without forewarning, I’m not good at words.

Her parlance was a smorgasbord of motley, half-made-up expressions. Replete with purple sermons and pedestrian jargon, it incorporated phrases of her making such as, But you have habituated me to a ball.⁴⁵

Prosaic reality was how she termed an interrupting phone call.⁴⁶

Yet during her time as a visiting teacher at the Juilliard School in the seventies, she so longed to appear hip to students, she used words such as Gee whiz.⁴⁷

At times it’s difficult not to believe she was in parts conventional. In a letter to her husband dated 18 November 1948, she makes clear her reasons for being: I live only for you and Mama—you share me between yourselves!⁴⁸

Sometimes her talk fazed intellectuals through its blunt deficiency of the cerebral. Making music was a thing that she described in culinary terms: "First of all you must have—well, as they say, to do pastasciutta you must have the ‘farina’—the flour … But, er … after you have the flour and all the necessary ingredients you have to make the pasta …"

Her passion for cuisine was such that Leo Lerman would eventually discover that when she asks me to order, in a Dallas restaurant, fifteen different varieties of ice cream, she will taste each and every one.⁴⁹

Singing wasn’t switching on a genius lightbulb. Callas’ multi-facetedness covered a great scope. For someone who expressly never had a publicist or press agent, she contrived her image with more care than most imagined; arranging her comportment to suit others’ expectations of her image.

It would trip people up. Watching her at a dinner party with the Queen Mother in 1959, philosopher Isaiah Berlin pondered: They were like two prima donnas, one emitting white and [the] other black magic.⁵⁰ Through this Berlin unwittingly unveiled a secret. Integrity and honesty were her two highest principles. Callas was genuine. But she was also well-read in the art of self-adjustment: crafting a persona comely for the social context. This was the woman who in 1971 greeted a New Yorker interviewer not with Hello, or Good morning but—fully attuned to the fads of the time—with the imperative, Shoot.⁵¹

In situations of uneasiness she made a point of masking her malaise: an act that made her cherish solitude. "I like to be with myself every now and then … she related. I feel the necessity to be alone—frequently. It’s our work … I have my own interior world … I can live with myself for weeks."⁵²

The press envisaged her a raging shrew. Knowing they had termed her tigress, she alluded to it almost casually. That could be a lovely title. It looks good in the newspapers. It attracts attention. And the tigress as a beast is certainly wonderful to look at.⁵³

Cracking the Callas code has been a daunting task for many. It has been easier to claim that she was binary, or even, in more slothful narratives, that she was schizophrenic. Biographers have relished visualizing Callas twins perpetually engaged in a polemic duel with pistols blazing. They seem to favor the idea that genius cannot exist without the presence of some kind of mania.

But Callas was too mindful, too consistent in her ways, and far too conscientious—conscientious being her favorite word—to be removed from self-awareness.

Nobody could have inspired day-long periods of rehearsal or performances she gave when she could barely stand; nobody forced her hand to cite her instrument throughout her correspondence. Many were written at a time when she was thought to be preoccupied by her liaison with a well-known billionaire. She spoke about her gift as though it were her ailing child—reporting on it as she might a separate person: The voice is quite healthy … I want and desire it [for the performance to go well] more than anything you can imagine.⁵⁴

At rare moments in her life one caught a glimpse of all of her: the contrasts that had fused to make an alloy and the human meshing with the superhuman. A friend once scrutinized her as she read the music of Verdi’s Lucrezia Borgia for the first time while her husband dozed off at a typewriter. … she was gone, completely immersed in the score. Occasionally, she looked at me and she smiled, but she didn’t see me. This went on for a very long time, and I was enthralled … Maria took off her glasses, closed the book, put down the pencil, looked at me, and said, ‘It’s wonderful. It’s really wonderful.’ And I said, ‘Do you know it all now?’ And she said, ‘Well, you know, you have to know it all, so that when you go out on the stage for the first rehearsal, you know who you are. Then I am free to breathe onstage.’ ⁵⁵

Her life is the story of a woman who subverts stereotypes. Back in 1859 composer Hector Berlioz assumed that he had found the one. The man had fallen haplessly in love with mezzo Pauline Viardot. Under her bewitching spell he penned a declaration:

The whole of my life has been nothing but a long and passionate aspiration towards an ideal which I had created for myself. As soon as my heart … found in an individual one of the qualities, one of the charms of that ideal, it became fixed on that individual. Alas! disillusion soon came to tell me that I had made a mistake. My life passed like that, and, at the moment when I feel it to be near its end, the ideal, which I had had to give up as the fantastic creation of an insane imagination, suddenly appeared to my dying heart! … Let me spend the last days which remain to me in blessing you, in thanking you for coming to prove to me that I was not mad.⁵⁶

Eventually his love came to a standstill. Some time later he was swayed again and found another goddess to adorn with worship.

But she also disenchanted him.

And now we know the crux of Berlioz’s quandary. The composer’s problem was not fickleness: he simply lived a hundred years before the birth of his ideal.

1.

Voluptuous intoxication

Manhattan in the 1920s didn’t have the aura of those cosmopolitan, resplendent cities known for cultivating artists. If anything it was an unsophisticated Paris or Berlin still on the cusp of evolution. Flooded with fresh immigrants left stupefied by the vernacular, the charged hub was an overflowing puddle of colliding crowds. Prohibition stirred a melting pot for vendors peddling taboo flasks. Walls flaked with peeling posters of parading ships and pinkish skylines vying to burn holes in tourists’ pockets. An enviable residence for any gawping foreigner, the Big Apple was contemptible among the erudite elite.

Gleaming temptations that New Yorkers eyed in 1923 were miles away from the domains in which the greats of music had been reared. These were not the chandelier-lit, pearl-white halls that had once echoed the belabored steps of Mozart loath to play a rondo in the Prince-Archbishop’s court; or the enchanting Milanese salons of Countess Clara Maffei that had served as Verdi’s haunts. No Donizetti was on hand to offer tutelage to a Bellini; neither was the thirty-something Nadia Boulanger in search of sapling pianists to nurture.

The emergence of another kind of artist was apparent. Westerly a dawning Hollywood fed icons being bred. Neon signs of a jazz powerhouse blinked garishly across the South.

But no cane-carrying musicologist could have anticipated that the title of the greatest opera singer ever known would be ascribed to a shy girl from a Greek enclave in a run-down region of Manhattan.

Hometowns like to lay claim to their famed artists, striving to convert them into edifices as defining as the Eiffel Tower. It is perhaps befitting then that Callas—who would state, "I don’t feel that my roots lie anywhere"¹—was born into a bustling city swelling with diasporas of different roots.

At the time of her birth Callas did not exist; even Maria was far off from being her label. A person’s date of birth is one of life’s sole certainties; in her case it was one of many factoids. Changed and variously recorded, the specific remained unconfirmed to Callas till the age of forty-four.²

The newborn struggled to incite festivities. Her mother’s arms remained a foreign haven for the four days in which Evangelia Kalogeropoulou—a twenty-five-year-old Greek woman who had four months previously arrived in New York with her husband Yorgos—categorically refused to face the baby girl. The couple was Greek Orthodox; by no means terribly religious but a great deal superstitious. Both parents had been anxiously relying on the prophecy of an astrologer who had assured them their descendant would be male.³ They had been certain God would grant them a male heir to compensate for their lost son, Vasily, who had died of meningitis at the age of three.⁴ Already in possession of a girl—six-and-a-half-year-old Yakinthy—the baby daughter marred their expectations.

In New York Yakinthy became known as Jackie. Remembering her sister’s birth, she told her readers it had been disturbing news.⁵ Their mother Evangelia Dimitriadou, known as Litsa, was the daughter of an army officer.⁶ Yorgos Kalogeropoulos—a student of pharmacy—hailed from Meligala in the Peloponnese. The name that Evangelia and her daughters took was Kalogeropoulou.i Though they were not of a superior class her family looked down on Yorgos with cantankerous contempt.⁷

It was a loveless and disastrous marriage unimproved by the unwanted child.

Evangelia half-heartedly suggested that the girl be called Sophia, a classic Greek name borne by one of her sisters. Yorgos—whose name had now been anglicized to George—conflicted with his wife, insisting that she be Cecilia. Both names were written on the birth certificate—but incorrectly. "Sophie Cecelia [sic] Kalos was how this little girl was registered. Her mother’s maiden name Dimitriadou was recorded as Demes."⁸ Present in the delivery room together with the parents and Jackie was Dr. Leonidas Lantzounis, a friend of the Kalogeropouloses who still spoke no English and largely relied on their niche.

Since neither parent saw fit to remember such a date or keep the birth certificate, disputes surrounding it unfolded speedily. The girl had been born a month early.⁹ While her birth certificate reads 2 December Evangelia convinced her daughter it had been the fourth. I couldn’t tell you what originated these two versions … a forty-one-year-old Maria wrote to her friend Herbert Weinstock. I can only think that my mother mixed up the date of my birthday with my sister’s [who had been born on June 4th].¹⁰

She entered the world at Flower Hospital on Fifth Avenue near Manhattan’s 105th Street: a facility now known as the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center. In the delivery room a plaque was later installed: Maria Callas was born in this hospital on December 2, 1923. These halls heard for the first time the musical notes of her voice, a voice which has conquered the world. To this great interpreter of universal language of music, with gratitude.¹¹

Can a toddler offer signs of genius? Likely only in the fantasies of (caring) parents. With curly raven hair and gaping chestnut eyes, the infant didn’t seem extraordinary—but she made ungodly noise. Speaking in 1957 she remembered, I can’t remember when I first started to sing, but according to my parents I began very early—when I was barely out of the cradle. The neighbors heard her hurling vocalizes and high notes so unusual for an infant that they found themselves stupefied.¹²

They would be playing ball—whatever, and Maria would be singing,¹³ her second cousin twice removed, Mary Annexy, described her mother’s memories in 2012.¹⁴ The two- or three-year-old suffused the atmosphere with whirls of babbled melodies galore.

Sometime in the early months after her birth the family relocated to 87 Sixth Avenue in Astoria, where Yorgos Kalogeropoulos became George Kalous.¹⁵ "Soft jobs are for soft people and that sort soon spoil!" preached a contemporary poster.¹⁶ The rookie pharmacist expected to spruce up his English and acquire his drugstore in a handful of months.

Five years would pass. With shattered dreams George earned a living teaching Greek and working as a lab assistant.¹⁷

Maria was christened on 26 February 1926 in a Greek Orthodox cathedral, the Holy Trinity, at 319 East 74th Street. Her name was finally registered in the Hall of Records as Maria Anna Cecilia Sophia Kalogeropoulos: colloquially Mary Anna or Mary.¹⁸ As the priest dipped the girl infant in the font she bonded with the water; an affiliation she would later resurrect in a capacity to swim great strokes. Her lungs protested as her parents finally began to dress her; fussing till they yielded to a piercing scream. An untrained voice.¹⁹

Legend (propagated by her mother and her sister) has it that Maria first became acquainted with an instrument aged four. Allegedly she was enchanted by the pianola Evangelia had bought. The latter recollected how Maria spent time pressing down its pedals: one of the first urban Callas myths.²⁰

July 1928 laid bare a nervous disposition.²¹ Jackie had just turned eleven. Evangelia’s chronic hatred of the family’s surroundings had provoked the clan to move more times than they could count: Washington Heights was now their neighborhood.²² Maria was a lanky creature with thick tufts of bushy, coarse dark hair and dangling bangs; a timid girl already beaming with the love that she would radiate in later years.

I was walking with my parents, she later recalled, and suddenly I saw Jackie, who was playing ball on the other side of the street, with our housekeeper and a cousin. It often happens with me—it’s a characteristic side of my personality—that I’m seized by sudden tender impulses and feel ashamed of them immediately afterward, I don’t know why, perhaps because of excessive modesty about my feelings. At that time, too, catching sight of my sister, I ran to her to give her a kiss and then ran away, red and embarrassed, precipitously crossing the street just at the moment when a car was coming along at great speed.

The drama varies source to source. Incapable of summoning the recollections of her life at four, Maria tells us she was dragged to the end of the street and unconscious for twelve days.²³ Her sister deflates the entire affair—insisting the length of Maria’s hospitalization was less than a week.²⁴

The aftermath was trance-like: As far as I can remember, during the days I spent in the hospital after a road accident when I was five, the long hours of fever and hazy consciousness were full of strange kinds of music, melodious sounds that were confused but attractive and stimulating, she would recall.²⁵

Tired of her husband and their constant monetary struggles, in summer 1929 a frazzled Evangelia took both her daughters on vacation to their cousins’ house in Florida, where the three women stayed for no more than two months.²⁶ Newly bespectacled, the five-year-old Maria suffered from severe myopia.²⁷

Their trip to Tarpon Springs was one of the rare times the girls were granted temporary respite: a luxury that spurred Maria on to offer an impromptu debut. Cousin Helen Arfaras (née Kritikou) was a little older than her at the time. In 2001 she remembered the visit. She always sang wherever she went. My mother had on the piano a Spanish shawl, and Maria would take it and perform. She would go before the mirror and just sing. She warbled like a bird.²⁸

By now George had learnt broken English and acquired a license to open The Splendid Pharmacy, a Hell’s Kitchen drugstore. In addition to this he had managed to squander their income. A sweet, handsome man who was irresponsible and lied like all men, was Maria’s description of him decades later.²⁹ Good friend Leonidas Lantzounis was on hand to loan ten thousand dollars.³⁰ Its use was limited when the destructive Wall Street Crash immersed the U.S. into chaos on October 24th.

They were living on 181st Street—having moved yet again. Evangelia was exasperating with her virulent invectives. The Crash provoked in her a most melodramatic stunt: when George was forced to close his pharmacy because of failing business, Evangelia hastened to the cupboard before closing time and grabbed some pills she swiftly swallowed. Immediately her husband took her to the hospital to have her stomach pumped. George’s connections in the field of medicine assured him that the incident would stay a secret: suicide attempts were at the time illegal; punishable by imprisonment.³¹ Twelve-year-old Jackie knew her mother never sought to kill herself. Evangelia’s one and only personal appearance in opera, was how she would term it.³² The woman wanted more than anything to be a star.

Oblivious to her mother’s inner workings, young Maria was still slow to understand that things were not quite right throughout the Callas home. Never did the family starve in New York—not even after the Crash.  ‘Poverty’ is not really the word because, I can’t say I really suffered poverty, she later related.³³ On another occasion she stated, We didn’t have much money at the time, but there was nothing tragic about that, as a lot of nonsensical gossip has claimed.³⁴

George began to prosper again when he became a traveling salesman for a drug company to market his treatment for gum disease; business took him away for long whiles. Later he told Jackie he cherished escapes from his onerous wife.³⁵

*

Maria’s first four grammar school grades took place at four different institutions.³⁶ A shadow of a musical formation started at the age of eight in 1932. The pianola was replaced with a piano Jackie heartily embraced. Maria scrutinized her sister as she played and soon the febrile fascination grew into her own tuition at the hands of one Signorina Sandrina.³⁷

Her first encounter with the instrument innate to her was zealously emblazoned in Maria’s memory. "At the same time as the piano, my first bitter efforts to teach myself to sing … Up till then I had listened to music on the wireless, especially to light American songs which I picked up with great ease. But when the world of opera was opened out before me, I became infatuated, filled with a sort of voluptuous intoxication. I owe a great deal to Bizet. When I was still a child I was fascinated by Carmen; in fact it was probably Carmen that decided my life. I remember I went from room to room singing the enchanting ‘Habanera’ over and over again. And when my family could bear it no longer I switched over to Philine’s song in Mignon—‘Je suis Titania.’ It was a good way of alternating the light soprano with the contralto and thus keeping all the doors open. An avid radio listener, the first opera that she heard was Aïda, on the wireless."³⁸

In September 1932 Jackie enrolled at George Washington High School on Aubudon Avenue; Maria was inducted into yet another school. Slowly the latter came to understand that Evangelia was a standout.

My mother is very nervous, always moaning, Maria would describe in 1969. When I was little I remember that she always complained about having to be our slave, of having sacrificed everything for us. So as not to hear her I would get away.³⁹ No tenderness—even a false one—could have emanated from the character of Mrs. Kalogeropoulou. Flaubert or Balzac would have balked at her gargantuan gradation of grotesque.

When the girls were little she would sprinkle pepper on their lips if she believed she heard a lie.⁴⁰ Sixteen-year-old Jackie wore a hat her mother didn’t like. Evangelia responded with a brusque smack on the head with an umbrella. George attempted feebly to defend his daughter; insisting that she hit her on the rear if necessary.⁴¹ Peeks into the family of high school friend Clare Poretz guided Jackie to discover something was dysfunctional about her own. Preferring not to dwell on these sore episodes, Maria was reluctant to divulge remembrances of early childhood. Sometime in her thirties nonetheless she showed her friend Giovanna Lomazzi a mark on her leg: Evangelia’s blow with a chair.⁴²

George lacked the impetus to hurry to their rescue. Mostly meek, he had a limited desire to gain affluence. Maria would speak fondly of the man—recalling how her shyness made itself apparent in their outings: "My father always used to say when we walked, and, especially if we passed by a[n] ice cream parlor [and] I’d all of a sudden stop walking—I’d pull my father’s jacket—and I wouldn’t say a word. I’d just look at him—wouldn’t look at the ice cream parlor, I would look at him—and, well, he had caught on after a while, but he’d play the comedy and say, ‘Well, what are you asking for, what do you want? Will you tell me?’ And I wouldn’t say a word; I was just looking at him like mad."⁴³

Overall what George felt for the girls was not enough to qualify as love. In an interview in 1958 he listed his two daughters’ birthdays incorrectly. Long absences from both their lives in later years suggest he never had a penchant for their company. At the peak of his daughter’s career he insisted that he and Maria had always been close.

Although Maria’s music lessons had been Evangelia’s initiative, he lied and took the credit. In his broken English George announced in 1958 on television: "Especially I prefer to give Maria when she was eight years old [lessons], to start with her private teacher to give vocal voice, until the time she gone back [sic] Greece for a visit."⁴⁴ He also told George Jellinek about a year later that he was very proud of the way he had behaved during the girls’ childhood, since he had never let [his] wife go to work.⁴⁵

In the early years of their relationship Maria didn’t seek to question George’s love. [He was] a little weak, gentle, she would remember. He was always travelling so I rarely got to see him.⁴⁶ Probed about her girlhood memories, she mostly complimented or defended George. Perhaps he is too honest and too much a gentleman to succeed in elbowing his way into the business jungle, she scribed in 1957.⁴⁷

Soon Evangelia’s forceful hand began to have its way—and not just when it came to corporal punishment. As she discovered that Maria had a voice, her own hope of renown resurfaced. Convinced she would have been a singer or an actress if the world had treated her more fairly,⁴⁸ Evangelia ravenously plotted her two daughters’ stardom. Jackie showed signs of becoming a promising pianist. Meanwhile the girls had barely realized their Hellenic roots.⁴⁹ Asked in the midst of her career about her mother tongue, Maria answered: Of course we always favor our own home language which is, of course, English American.⁵⁰ The second language that she learned was French in grade school.⁵¹

There Maria knew no trouble. Attending at least six schools before puberty could not have been a relishable venture.⁵² Yet whilst her childhood left a memory of bitter domesticity, her elementary education represented some form of relief. Recurrently she would compare the bliss of school days to the stressful atmosphere that plagued the peak of her career: "Well, very happy days, I must say—carefree days. I remember we had a principal that was very severe and he kept on saying, ‘Now, children—self-control. Remember that all your lives.’ I am."⁵³

Her sole regret was having been too serious for merriment. From that perspective she was slightly envious of her sister’s carefree attitude. I was always much too mature for my age—and not very happy,⁵⁴ Maria admitted. But she also made a point of saying, I am supposed to have been consumed with jealousy of my sister. My goodness, she was seven [actually six] years older than I. What child does not look in longing at a sister so much older and in the ordinary course of nature, much lovelier than I could be then?⁵⁵

Ten-year-old Mary Anna couldn’t help her introvertedness. Her deepest sentiments of isolation would be deftly blanketed and out of sight. Despite her amiability Maria struggled to appear outgoing. A hard-working student, she received A’s, B+’s and B’s from the ages of five to thirteen.⁵⁶ Miss Jessie Sugar at her last school, P.S. 189, spoke of the child as a pleasant, well-behaved girl with no sign of temper.⁵⁷

It wasn’t just her mother steering her in the direction of the arts. Something was kindled in Maria every time her ears met music. A spark had been ignited in her infancy and she would later write regarding Evangelia’s career choice, "I was quite happy to second her, but only on the condition that I be able one day to become a great singer. All or nothing."⁵⁸

Criticizing others’ voices as a child, Maria disliked Lily Pons. The radio aired a live performance of the Metropolitan’s Lucia di Lammermoor with the soprano on March 3rd, 1934 as part of a tradition of Saturday matinee broadcasts. This may be the rendition referenced by biographer George Jellinek when he described how the young girl insisted, "I don’t care if she is a star, she sings off-key! Just wait and see, one day I am going to be a star myself, a bigger star than she."⁵⁹

Years later when Maria would be making her debut in a Saturday matinee broadcast, she nervously mused: When I think that I stole so much of my homework just to listen to these Saturday broadcasts when I was a child it’s just, er … well, it gives me, I suppose, the jitters to have to do it today, although I should be used to it.⁶⁰

That same year the public caught her voice while dawdling on the sidewalk. As she sang La Paloma its current swept out of her window; passers-by stopped in their tracks.⁶¹ Jackie reported that one of their neighbors, a Swedish man, later arrived at their doorstep to offer free lessons for her. Maria studied with him for two months.⁶²

Soon she had her first steps in a theatre. It was the Hippodrome in New York on Sixth Avenue, a building later demolished in 1939. The opera was Aïda but it didn’t feature cast members especially renowned.⁶³ Approaching her eleventh birthday, Maria was entered by Evangelia into a radio contest: the first of a few.

At one that took place a year later the master of ceremonies was comedian and actor Jack Benny. I didn’t win the first prize … Maria remembered. "Oddly enough … Oh, I remember only Jack Benny [who] was so terribly disappointed, he just … couldn’t, couldn’t believe it. There was a jury of … er, enfants prodiges—you know, very famous children at that time. I don’t remember who they were, but it was, I suppose, 1936, or ‘5 or ‘6, something like that … I won a Bulova wristwatch. And the one that won first prize, I would be most curious to know what happened to this … boy; he was an accordion player, imagine."⁶⁴

Maria next met Benny at President Kennedy’s Madison Square Garden birthday celebration, in which she was performing. It was May of 1962; he failed to recognize her: "We’ve met before, Mr. Benny. Don’t you remember? I made my first radio appearance as a contestant on a Major Bowes Amateur Hour … I came in second because you were the only judge who voted for me!"⁶⁵

The little singer of the school was her identity according to her recollections.⁶⁶ Classmate Georgette Kokenakis attended P.S. 189 with Maria, later becoming a teacher there. She recalled the latter making her stage debut with the song Play Gypsies, Dance Gypsies from Emmerich Kálmán’s Gräfin Mariza at the annual grade school graduation. This would probably have been in January 1935. By this time Maria—in her words—was studying voice and piano with a kind of fury.⁶⁷

This premiere was ingrained forever in her mind. They always chose me to sing at some operettas or things like that [at school], she would tell David Frost in 1970. "And I remember the first time—I never was terrified—I thought. But I went onstage and uh, I got such a dry throat that I couldn’t open my mouth. Nothing came out. But anyway, I was quite good at it, I suppose … And since then every year I was invited for the graduation play."⁶⁸

Realizing later how much stress she had felt early on, Maria wrote in 1957: My mother … decided to make of me a child prodigy as quickly as possible. And child prodigies never have genuine childhoods. It’s not a special toy that I remember—a doll or a favorite game—but, rather, the songs that I had to rehearse again and again, to the point of exhaustion, for the final test at the end of the school year; and above all the painful sensation of panic that overcame me when, in the middle of a difficult passage, it seemed to me that I was about to choke, and I thought, in terror, that no sound would emerge from my throat, which had become parched and dry. No one was aware of my sudden distress because, in appearance, I was extremely calm and continued to sing.⁶⁹

Juvenile stardom was a feat deplorable. I’m sorry for any children who grew up in that period of infant prodigies, when parents were getting such wonderful ideas about becoming rich and famous, Maria said in 1961. As things turned out, of course, I can’t complain. But to load a child so early with responsibility is something there should be a law against.⁷⁰

Yet it’s hard to know precisely how much Evangelia’s exploitation tainted the girl’s attitude toward a naturally delectable pursuit. The latter expressed her opinion on the subject with some ambiguity: I couldn’t continue school because my mother decided on my singing career, Maria told interviewer Norman Ross in 1957. Your mother drove you very hard as a singer, didn’t she? he responded. Yes, er … She sighed. I may be thankful for one thing, and I may not be thankful for another thing.

A coincidence befell the pair. The good-natured and hard-working student’s wishes met her mother’s merciless